Holy macaroni!
I appreciate your input, but what you said only amplifies my disgust with html. I'd have not figured out such by searching/browsing online in a proverbial million years, especially as the value/accuracy of content seemingly diminishes faster than a html tag goes obsolete.... ;-)
I'm more convinced than ever that I'm going to put my time/effort into writing, and presenting it in a way that others can parse and render as they like. As for everyone else, as with "natural selection", you don't do the work, you don't reap the benefit(s).
That "million years" comment reminds me that I wasted far too much time trying to figure out what layer is causing strings that look like URL's in my terminal become mouse-click-ably opened by my browser. Is it the xterm variant on my system? Is it tmux? Is it bash within a tmux pane? I spent hours, and came to no useful conclusion. I figured out how to display some terminfo escape sequences that I think are related, but I couldn't find any information on the terminfo entries I was seeing (Ms, Cs, Cr, and Ss).
I got the vague feeling it was an xterm matter, except that the relevant terminfo string crapola was revealed by "tmux show-options -s", so.... <shrugs while wincing and wondering where the wife hid the bottle of Jameson>
I appreciate your input, but what you said only amplifies my disgust with html. I'd have not figured out such by searching/browsing online in a proverbial million years, especially as the value/accuracy of content seemingly diminishes faster than a html tag goes obsolete.... ;-)
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think HTML itself is the problem. Sure, it can be tedious to type out the tags, but that's what Markdown and pandoc are for. But all the other shit you dislike, like links jumping around and pages taking 10,000 years to load despite having a high-speed connection?
That's fucking JavaScript, man. I don't use that shit on my website precisely because I want people to be able to read my bullshit. They aren't going to do that if they have to click through newsletter popups, cookie "consent" popups, video overlays, and all that other modern webshit. And they're not going to read it if it's just a plaintext file sitting on a gopher or anonymous FTP server somewhere; those days aren't even a dim memory for most people online.
If you change your mind about learning and using HTML, I've found the following useful as references:
Mozilla Developer Network: Introduction to HTML
As far as terminals using regexp to identify URLs and make them interactive: shit like this is why I've taken to using Emacs as my terminal. Copy/paste (or kill/yank if RMS is reading this) works the same in an eshell or vterm buffer as it works in any other sort of text buffer.
... reminds me that I wasted far too much time trying to figure out what layer is causing strings that look like URL's in my terminal become mouse-click-ably opened by my browser.
Not xterm, and not browser links, but similar.
$terminal (urxvt in my case) started to require confirmation, when pasting "funny characters" (simple new lines in my case!) into the terminal. Now, a terminal is a terminal and not my supervisor or nanny. I find this sort of thing "outrageous". A terminal, that tries to be smart? Even to the extent to outsmart me?? Seriously??? So I set out to find this naughty thing. Turns out, that urxvt sports extensions written in perl! A giant door to spy on my typing via extensions included behind my neck. Sigh! I managed to disable it by setting
URxvt.perl-ext-common:-confirm-paste
But it got me thinking. Maybe urxvt is just not the technology I should be using. That being said, I abandoned xterm, because of (perceived?) difficulties using a tiling window manager. Oh the joys of terminal diversity.